San Antonio writers Billy Taylor and Ron Franscell are finalists for the Edgar Award, honoring the best in mystery books and named for Edgar Allan Poe.

Taylor got the nod in the young adult fiction category for "Thieving Weasels," his debut YA novel. It is about a Princeton college student trying to escape his crime family who is drawn back in for one last con.

Franscell is the co-author with Dr. Vincent Di Maio, Bexar County's longtime medical examiner, of "Morgue: A Life in Death," a trek famous cases in which he has been involved, including the racially charged shooting of Florida teen Trayvon Martin and the unmasking of a serial baby-killer.

"Most of my favorite authors, including Stephen King, Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke, have won Edgar Awards, and just the thought of being included in a group like that is totally unbelievable to me," Taylor said. "Frankly, I'd be thrilled to bus tables at the awards dinner."

He added that he thought his novel has met with success because "I tried very hard to make the characters and situations in the book as real as possible. Luckily, I grew up surrounded by criminals, so I had a lot to draw from."

"His life has been a series of genuine mysteries — more than 25,000 death investigations, for Pete's sake — that aren't neatly plotted to be summed up nicely on Page 300," he said. "Many were high-profile cases, but every single one was consequential to somebody. Real stuff.

"We took readers behind the morgue doors, a place they wouldn't normally go, and told some rather vivid tales that nobody else can tell. But we also held up a mirror to our current media-infused culture and our own human tendencies to want answers before science can deliver facts that might change our views."

Franscell said he was honored to be an Edgar finalist.

"If the Edgars are crime-writing's Pulitzer, then an Edgar nomination is an acknowledgement that 'Morgue' is a story worth telling and is told well," he said. "Writers often worry that they have pleased themselves, but maybe nobody else, so these prizes often reassure us that somebody is reading and a story is worthy."